Hello, Ruby Jones here, and welcome back to our week of Longreads. Every day we have a feature story for you, read by the author who created it. This year, the daughter of the late Nobel Prize winning Canadian author Alice Munroe revealed something about her mother that had stayed hidden throughout Monro's life. In an essay in The Toronto Star, Monroe's daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, said that when she was nine years old, Monroe's husband, Andrea's stepfather, had assaulted her.
Andrew said she told her mother the truth when she was an adult, and Alice Munroe sided with him and kept it secret, saying she loved him too much to leave him. Today, art critic and author Sebastian Smee reads his piece on the author Alice Monroe. It's a reflection on the artists who act in ways unacceptable to us, but whose works are perhaps enriched by their moral ambiguity. It's an insightful and sharp piece of writing by one of the best observers of the art and literary worlds.
After The Monthly published this piece by Sebastian Smee, another of Monroe's daughters got in touch, saying she felt the piece reminds us of the value of literature in general and how it stands apart from its creator. I hope you enjoy Into the Dark the Legacy of Alice Monroe read by Sebastian Smee as much as I did. It's Tuesday, January seventh, Into.
The Dark the Legacy of Alice Monroe. Having read and re read Alice Munroe's stories for almost three years, I've often laughed at the laurel most frequently bestowed on her the near obligatory clam that the late Canadian short story writer was ah Chekhov if Tchehov, as Vladimir Nabokov once said, wrote sad books for humorous people. If he achieved beauty by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of
a low cloud. Munroe wrote shocking, vividly colored books for grown ups. Her favored landscapes may have been Canadian and small town rural, Her brushstrokes calm and evenly applied, but her palette verged on lurid. What makes her stories so riveting is not, of course, limited to one quality. She's too good for that, but it's often her feeling for what is vulgar, macabre, and disturbingly sexual. As Monroe aged,
the stories became wilder. She disguised her taste for disturbance with a plain spoken, why not see what happened style of narration. Her voice remained cool, her insight into human bafflement and peculiarity deep. Her stories were never as willfully shocking as, for instance, Ian McEwan's early short stories, but they could call to mind Christopher Rix's description of McEwen's novella The Comfort of Strangers, a tale, wrote Rix, that
is as economical as a shudder. It never itself shudders, which is one reason why it makes you do so.
That was Monroe. She never shuddered.
You wished at times she would, but then you probably wouldn't have that secret sensation when reading her best stories, like the cool damp feeling of sand on fingertips digging tunnels beneath sand castles, the sand must be damp for the structure to hold.
Monroe's stories.
Likewise, whisper that sensations must be kept secret. They may disintegrate if exposed to the light. When a character in one of her most shocking stories is asked by another woman if everything is okay in her marriage. She's right to be concerned. The wife becomes more circumspect she saw Munro writes that there were things that she was used
to that another person might not understand. It's normal to think that a writer so in control of her art form, and Monroe's command of structure, suspense, and nuance was a big part of what won her the twenty thirteen Nobel Prize for Literature must be in control of her own self. But artists move in the world like you and me. The only significant difference, perhaps is that their inner lives occupied constructing other worlds, so that alternative versions of the
life they're in continually found out in their wake. Even just a modicum of biographical knowledge about Munroe can make this disorienting in her stories. As American author Leah Hager Cohen has noted, the very shape of things, along with our sense of what is important and why, seems to shift as we proceed.
The real story keeps.
Turning out to be larger than and at canted angles to what we thought it would be. The effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming. Affirming maybe, but the instability tends to return, I find after Monroe's stories are put down. She wrote fearlessly about the confusions of sexuality and had a sharpened sense of the ways in which sex can prove a lifelong bafflement for men and women alike, from
childhood to the deathbed. Sex she saw was a banal biological compulsion and at the same time a driving force behind almost all of life's most complicated and recondite stories, from sibling rivalry to extramarital affairs and psychological perversion. Shame, often connected to sex and bodily functions, plays an outsized role in Monroe's stories. It's the water in which her
characters swim. A stepmother flow in Privilege from nineteen seventy eight, likes to see people brought down to earth, nature asserting itself. She was the sort of woman who will make public what she finds in the laundry bag. In the nineteen ninety sixth story The Love of a Good Woman, Enid, the good woman of the title, is assailed by dreams in which, writes Monrow, she would be copulating or trying
to copulate. Sometimes she was prevented by intruders, or shifts in circumstances with utterly forbidden and unthinkable partners, with fat, squirmy babies, or patience in bandages, or her own mother. She would be slick with lust, hollow and groaning with it, and she would set to work with a roughness and an attitude of evil pragmatism. She woke from these dreams quote unrepentant, sweaty and exhausted, and lay like a carcass until her own self, her shame and disbelief came pouring
back into her. In one of Munroe's most controversial early stories, Wild Swans, from nineteen seventy seven, her recurrent young protagonist Rose is caught between lurid warnings from her stepmother as to the dark agendas of men, her own erotic curiosity, and her disgust at the animal mechanics of sex. It was pitiful, infantile, this itching and shoving and squeezing spongy tissues inflamed membranes, tormented nerve endings, shameful smells, humiliation.
On a long train.
Trip, Rose is seated next to a man who declares himself to be an off duty uniting church minister. After some time, Rose feels something touch her. She wonders if it might be the man's hand. The possibilities alarming, but the thought also and Hubert Munroe would even go here, sends her into a meandering, erotic reverie about men's hands and caught everything they could do, and so so it is that moments later, Rose is imagining her French teacher
quote lapping and coiling his way through slow pleasures. A perfect autocrat of indulgences, she had a considerable longing to be someone's object, pounded, pleasured, reduced, exhausted. I don't remember passages like this in Chekhov. There are times, in fact, when you don't know what to do with what Munroe has just described. If you're on a bus or train, you can only hope that someone isn't reading over your shoulder. Munroe's sophisticated sense of structure and viewpoint will likely sustain
college tutorials well into the twenty second century. But her raw power is this frank, unshockable approach to what is most furtive and disgusting in human relations. Her shamelessness, to put it plainly, about shame itself. In Monroe's stories, shame leaks from one generation to the next. Sometimes its source is impossible to pinpoint. It's just an ambient condition, a disturbing spillage that moves like ink through water, or an
almost theological state like original sin. I always had a feeling with my mother's talk and stories of something swelling out behind, she writes in the Progress of Love, her nineteen eighty six short story, looped around three generations of women, like a cloud you couldn't see through or get to the end of. There was a cloud, a poison that had touched my mother's life. It seemed as if she knew something about me that was worse, far worse than
ordinary lies and tricks and meanness. It was a really sickening shame. I beat against my mother's front to make her forget that. It's not always possible to discern the sources of shame in Monroe's stories, but it is an emotional state so ubiquitous among her characters that its absence triggers act of suspicion. In nineteen seventy four's story Material, Monroe's female narrator is in bad gist by her lover's straightforward enjoyment of life. He has forgotten the language of
his childhood. She reflects privately. His love making was strange to me at first because it was lacking in desperation. He made love without emphasis, so to speak, with no memory of sin or hope of depravity. In Monroe's fictional universe, sex that is free from memory of sin or hope of depravity is not the rule. It's the exception.
For children.
In many of Monroe's stories, the adult world is a mysterious and tropically tangled domain, reeking with threat and allure Vandals. Written in nineteen ninety three and probably the Monroe story most widely re read in light of recent revelations about the writer's own life. Opens with two children, Eliza and Kenny. Their mother is dead, their father neglectful. Their home has quote no secret places. Everything is bare and simple ones.
They stray frequently into the property of the neighboring middle aged couple Ladner and b Ladner, a taxidermist and gruff World War II veteran, has built a dense empire of bridges, forests, and shaded ponds, a deep and jungly place full of tropical threats and complications.
Quote.
In some places, the air is thick and private, and in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are harsh or enticing. Certain walks imposed decorum, and certain stones are set to jump apart so that they call out for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction, where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut, and a star from a planet. And places also where they have run and hollered, and hung from
branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling, and sh in the grass unquote.
When later the reader realizes.
That Ladner has been molesting Liza, the significance of these descriptions lands like a second epiphany or a shiver its peak. Monroe Great fiction is often concerned with the ways in which relationships, even loving relationships, can turn into a struggle for control. Monroe's understanding of the tactical battles that take place inside long term partnerships made her a connoisseur of
the origins and varieties of misogyny. In Labor Day Dinner from nineteen eighty one, Roberta, a middle aged woman is told by George, her lover that her armpitza flabby. Roberta notes quote a harsh satisfaction in her lover's voice, the satisfaction of erring disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body. In the wake of his comment, Roberta feels love free because she has the quote great tactical advantage of being the one to whom the wrong has been done, the
unforgivable thing said. This is sharply observed. But the way Munroe turns her partner's comment on her appearance from an insult into a tactical lever provokes an uncomfortable question. Do the Machiavelian power politics within marriage open up the possibility that one partner will absorb the great wrong in order that she or he can demand something else. In this case, Roberta's impulse to stay inside this emotional dynamic is short lived.
After letting his comments sit with her, she entertains an alternative way of seeing the same thing, which is a recurring preoccupation in Monroe's fiction. Suppose he doesn't think it's unforgivable, she writes. Suppose in his eyes, she's the one who's unforgivable. Monroe then registers the silent displacement of shame from where morally it belongs with George to where it doesn't belong
with Roberta. By describing the pathos of Roberta's beauty regime, nothing she tries arrests the inevitable decline quote flabby armpits. What is to be done now the payment is due? And what for for vanity? Hardly even for that, just for having those pleasing services once and letting them speak for you, just.
For allowing an arrangement of.
Hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You don't stop in time, don't know what to do. Instead, you lay yourself open to humiliation, so thinks Roberta, with self pity what she knows to be self pity rising and sloshing around in her like bile. She must get away,
live alone, wear sleeves. In describing power struggles within relationships, Monroe had an inclination and an mobility not only to go deeper, but to start earlier, with the uniquely tortured, anguished struggles for control between parents and their children in Royal Beatings from nineteen seventy seven. Her recurrent character Rose,
a girl, is beaten by her father. As he approaches with his belt, Rose finds herself wondering about murders and murderers quote does the thing have to be carried through in the end, partly for the effect to prove to the audience of one that such a thing can happen, that the most dreadful antic is justified feelings can be found to match it. This is an extraordinarily sophisticated thought
for a young girl to have. But Rose is very bright and evidently a stand in for Munroe, who, as an author, is an expert in finding feelings to match all kinds of actions. The father approaching with the belt is quote like a bad actor who turns apart grotesque, as if he must save it and insist on just what is shameful and terrible about this. That's not to say that he's pretending that he's acting and does not mean it. He is acting, and he means it. Rose knows that she knows everything about him.
Monroe writes.
Royal Beatings traces the course of Rose's righteous indignation in the aftermath of the beating, as her noisy sobbing wears off It's replaced by a calm, decisive state in which things quote take on a lovely simplicity, choices a mercifully clear unquote. Rose resolves never to speak to her father and stepmother again. She will never look at them with anything but loathing, writes Monro, never forgive them. This produces in her a sensation of superiority, like floating beyond herself,
beyond responsibility. But then this resolution, too, cracks rose nose. She will relent and return to her status as a child subject to adult power. The struggle for control persists all the way through to adulthood silence. A story from Monroe's two thousand and four collection run Away features Juliette, a well known TV personality whose adult daughter Penelope, disappears to a spiritual retreat and cuts off all contact with
her mother. Juliet is bereft, and when a message finally arrives summoning her to visit, she feels quote like an old patch of cracked earth getting a full drink of rain. But when Juliette arrives after a long journey, a woman representing the retreat informs her that Penelope is no longer there. She won't say where Penelope has gone only that wherever it is quote, it will be the right thing for
her spirituality and her growth. The woman has a pointed herself as intermediary in the struggle for control between mother and child, which makes her, in Juliete's size, unbearable. Penelope is winning for many years, Juliette knows nothing of her whereabouts. She later muses on the cause or causes of the estrangement. Quote, you know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason, and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about
my failures and excesses and my selfishness. Or I could say that she Penelope is harsher. No, let us say purer in her judgments than many people have the nerve to be. But what's also possible, juliet concedes, because in such matters there is never just one version?
Is that quote? She couldn't stand me.
In Monroe's stories, intrafamilial struggles are not just about control. They're also about shifting interpretation of events and conflicting memories. What can be mentioned and what must be buried deep. The story The Progress of Love is occupied with two sisters, pious and traumatized Marietta and worldly, jovial Beryl, their memories and interpretations of various family events differ significantly. For example, Marietta one day finds her mother standing on a chair
beneath a noose. She runs for help, but returns to find her mother in the kitchen behaving as if nothing has happened. Marietta records this incident as evidence that her father's womanizing drove her mother to the brink of suicide, but her sister Beryl remembers the suicide attempt as a ruse, something their mother threatened to carry out and embarked upon theatrically in the hope that her husband, upon discovering her,
would mend his ways. In other words, she was acting and not meaning it, not intending to carry through the awful action. She abandoned the endeavor, believes Beryl, when it turned out to be her daughter who came across the scene rather than her errant's spouse. A recurring motif in this story, The progress of love is layers of wallpaper in the narrator's childhood home, pasted up, torn down, and
papered over again. Monroe is inviting us to think of the home as a palimpsest, not so much of memories, but of fictions, irreconcilable versions of the same events. Sex, shame, love, the multidirectional power struggles between husband and wife, mother and child, sister and sister. All are interleaved, messily, wilfully resisting order.
Who is right who is wrong?
As is Monroe's maddening rivet and custom there aren't any answers, just more layers.
Coming up after the break. The recent revelations of Alice Munroe's.
Dark past, Monro's voyages through the inky murk of disputed family histories trigger something in us all. The New Yorker staff writer j Young Young Fan recently described the quote very uncomfortable and unnerving stab of recognition that she felt when revisiting Monro's evocations of a subterranean emotional landscape.
That I knew too.
Well of familial secrecy, of things being buried so deeply that excavation itself would be betrayal to those I loved, and possibly to myself. But in July this year, less than two months after Monroe's death at the age of ninety two, something happened that jolted these narrative obsessions off the page and into the all too real life of Monroe's own family. Monroe's estranged adult daughter, Andrea Skinner, the youngest of the writer's three daughters with her first husband,
Jim Monroe, published an essay in The Toronto Star. Skinner wrote that her stepfather, Monroe's second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her in nineteen seventy six, when Skinner was nine. She said that her mother, Alice Monroe, when told of the abuse more than a decade later, quote, chose to stay with and protect my abuser unquote. Jim and Alice Monroe separated in nineteen seventy four, and in nineteen seventy six Monroe married Fremlin, a man she had first met
in college twenty years earlier. Jim and Alice shared custody of Andrea, who stayed with her father and his new wife during school term and in the summers, joined her
mother and Fremlin in rural Ontario. One night during the first such summer, when Monroe was away, Skinner asked Fremlin if she could sleep in her mother's bed, which was separate from but next to Fremlin's, During the night Fremin climbed into that bed, and while Skinner feigned sleep, began rubbing the nine year old girl's genitals and pressing her hand over his penis. In the morning, Skinner awoke with
a migraine and feelings of dread. She said nothing to her mother about what had happened, but at the end of the summer, she did tell her stepbrother and stepmother, and they told her father, Jim Munroe. Jim, however, did not talk to Skinner about what had happened, and he said nothing to Munroe. When Jim sent his daughters back to Munroe and Fremlin's house the next summer, he told Skinner's two older sisters to look out for her and
make sure she was never alone with Fremlin. Fremlin didn't touch Skinner again, but he evidently kept her in a state of dread. According to Skinner, he exposed him her, propositioned her for sex, and threatened that if she ever told her mother, the shock would kill her. Skinner stayed quiet, but the stress of being placed in such an impossible position took a toll. Her migraines continued, she developed bulimia,
and she later struggled at college, eventually dropping out. In nineteen ninety two, at the age of twenty five, Skinner wrote a letter to her mother telling her about Fremlin's abuse. She said she had been quote afraid all my life that you would blame me for what happened unquote. Monroe's response was complex. Leaving Fremlin, she went to stay in one of her other homes, presumably to process what she
had just been told. According to Skinner, Munroe was humiliated and felt betrayed both by Fremlin, her husband, and Skinner, her daughter. The cause of her sense of betrayal is unclear. Was it Fremlin's abuse or was it the failure of those who knew about it, perhaps including Skinner, to tell her. Skinner wrote that when she told her mother that the experience had damaged her, Munroe minimized it. But you were such a happy child, she said. Fremlin's response, meanwhile, was
at once appalling and bazaarre. He wrote a letter to the whole family in which he gave his own explicit account of the abuse. He blamed Skinner with words such as home wrecker and lolita, casting himself as Nabokov's delusional narrator. Humbert Humbert Fremlan threatened to kill both himself and Skinner, and to go public with photographs of Skinner that he'd taken while she was eleven, which he described as quote
extremely eloquent, unquote. He was sorry for betraying Munroe, but not it seemed, for anything he had done to his nine year old step daughter. We don't know what went through Munroe's mind as she tried to process all this. Many women have found themselves in similar predicaments. They are not the ones who have committed the abuse, but they find themselves obliged to respond to act, even as their lives and the lives of those around them threatened to implode.
All we know is that Munroe returned to Fremlin after their brief separation. She explained that she had been told too late, sixteen years after the original abuse, and that she loved Fremlin too much to leave him. Although Skinner made regular subsequent visits to the home of Munroe and Fremlin, she stopped going when she became pregnant, unwilling to let
Fremlin near her children. When Munroe complained about the inconvenience of this decision, Skinner erupted in anger, recounting details of the abuse and asking how her mother could have sex with someone who'd done that to her daughter. When Munroe call all to the next day to forgive Skinner for her outburst, according to Skinner, Skinner cut off all contact.
She reported the abuse to police in two thousand and five, submitting as evidence the letter Fremlin had written in nineteen ninety two in which she admitted to the sexual contact. Fremlin pleaded guilty to indecent assault and was handed as suspended sentence with two years probation. In the wake of Skinner's revelations, another woman, Jane Maury, came forward to say that Fremlin, a friend of her parents, had exposed himself to her and invited her to reciprocate when she was nine.
She told her parents immediately and Fremlin was banished from the house. Others have pointed out that while male artists have been revealed time and again as sex pests and much worse, accusations of bad behaviour against women artists tend to revolve around failures of motherhood. This is what female monstrousness looks like, writes declared Debtora in Monsters of Fans Dilemma. Abandoning the kids always even so when you imagine Skinner's
suffering and understand what caused it. Munroe's response to her daughter's testimony looks tragically, ill judged and yes, even monstrous. Munro's children told The Toronto Star that they went public not because they want to destroy their mother's legacy, but because they want Skinner's account to strengthen our understanding of.
Who Monroe was as a writer.
I believe we should take their stated wish at face value and consider how this new information changes our understanding of Alice Munroe's fiction. To me, the revelations aren't just something to digest and set aside, as we habitually do for better or worse, when we learned it, Miles Davis or Iris Murdock or Edgar Degar did horrible things or expressed vile opinions. That's because, rather than hollowing out Munroe's stories, what Skinner has told us thickens them with new textures
and meanings. Her account affects how we read the stories. Not because they contain evidence for Munroe's posthumous prosecution, i e.
Shall we cancel her or not?
But because the themes connected to this terrible real life situation. We're not off to the side, but central to what Munroe was always writing about, shame, sex, abuse of trust, estrangement of parents and children. In other words, the revelations don't just deepen the stories as autonomous works of art. They deepen one of Munro's most consistent themes, the morally troubled relationship between the stories we tell and the lives we lead or are led by. Munro's collection The Progress
of Love contains a story called Lichen. It was written six years before Munroe learned to Fremlin's abuse of her daughter, although it now seems possible she already knew things about Fremlin that found their way into her stories. Lychan is about Stella and her ex husband David, who has a sexual kink, a weird need not only to carry around pornographic photographs, but to show them to unsuspecting people, including
Stella and on another occasion, her married neighbor Ron. David is turned on, in other words, by sharing dirty secrets. He suffers from this need to be shocking and perverse. It's a kind of suffering. We're told that other people don't understand, but he feels that Stella does understand.
During a garden party.
While stroking the quote cold brown shaved and prickly calf of another man's wife with his big toe. This is while he and Stella are still married. David has the feeling that he and Stella are quote bound together after all, and as long as he could feel such benevolence toward her, what he did secretly and separately was somehow done with her blessing. Unquote that, writes Munroe did not turn out to be a notion Stella shared at all. The break
up when it came was difficult. We've been together so long. Couldn't be just tough it out, says Stella, at one point, trying to make it sound like a joke. What she didn't understand, and this is Monroe at her best, was that the length of time they had been together was
precisely what made their continuation for David impossible. Stella, you see quote, dragged so much weight with her, a weight not just of his sexual secrets, but of his middle of the night's speculations about God, his psychosomatic chest pains, his digestive sensitivity, his escape plans, which once included her and involved Africa or Indonesia, all his ordinary and extraordinary life, even some things that was unlikely she knew about seems
stored up in her. She could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion with a woman who knew so much. She was bloated with all she knew. Monroe writes, Stella drags with her not only the weight of all the trivial things she knows about him, the usual weight of marriage, in other words, but also the heavier load of his sexual perversion, of all that she has seen
and constructively accepted. In Monroe's stories, which are about what reviewer Michiko Katakhani called, quote the complicated arithmetic of familial relationships, the freedoms and constraints imposed by marriage unquote, questions about a woman's willingness to tolerate what her male partner has shamefully done, what he hopes to get away with are often mixed up in the woman's search for her own lightness,
her own secret and victorious expansion. As for me, writes the narrator in Miles City, Montana, a story from nineteen eighty five of a family road trip, I was happy because of the shedding. I loved taking off in my own house. I seemed to be looking for a place to hide, sometimes from the children, but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and
the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on family road trips she feels different. She would be tending to the children or her husband, and quote, all the time, those bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful
and light hearted. These are clearly the thoughts of a writer, some one who describes herself as a watcher, not a keeper, someone for whom the things that happened to her and to those around her are clues, artifacts, matches struck in the dark, things to be arranged, made use of. As for a brief and exultant period, they fly together inside her. Someone like Alice Munroe. The bits and pieces promise to achieve a quote essential composition unquote, like a perfect short story.
But is this.
Promise finally an illusion? In Vandals, the story in which Liza a girl child is sexually abused in the jungly adult world created by Ladner. Across the road. Liza's mother is dead, but there is a maternal figure in her life. In the course of the story, B, who lives with Liza's abuser, Ladner, appears to accumulate culpability for what has
happened to the child at her husband's hands. At the time of her first meeting with Ladner, B he already had a lover the local school principle he is a decent, affable man to whom Ladner is pointedly rude. Ladner's crotchety behavior perversely attracts Be and makes her lover seem suddenly repellent.
Quote.
She didn't want any more of his geniality, is good intentions, his puzzling and striving. She knows it is regressive and bad form to admit it, But Ladner made Bee realize she was one of those women who might always be on the lookout for an insanity that can contain them unquote. Since B is wholly occupied with Ladner, as little chance she will notice what Eliza so urgently needs her to notice.
B perversely relishes the way that Ladner will allow her to quote live surrounded by ready doses of indifference, which at times might seem like scorn.
He sometimes mocks.
Her by hind her back in this way, building a sinister sort of complicity with the children. As she falls under his spell, she pities herself quote for being a victim of her sexual wants, and feels punished for being quote such a tiresome.
Vamp and fraud.
In the meantime, there's no sign that she is aware of Ladner's particular insanity his sexual abuse of Liza. In the story, years pass, Ladner's crimes go unpunished. Liza grows up to become a born again Christian with puritanical tendencies, never drinking alcohol, never eating sugar, counting the strokes when
she brushes her teeth. But she has something else in her a wildness, a herodon like craving for revenge, and it emerges one day after a winter storm when Bee, who is dealing with Ladner as he undergoes heart surgery, asks her to check on the house. Eliza takes her young husband Warren, on a snowmobile to do as Bee has asked, and then, while Warren placidly watches TV, e Liza wrecks the house, hence the story's title Vandals.
The reader roots for e Liza.
Of course, when the motive for her destructive spree becomes clear. What is not clear is how fair it is for Liza's vengeance to be aimed, as it clearly is also at b. We assume b has been in the dark about Ladner's abuse, as Monroe herself was in the dark for more than a decade about Fremlin's But at the very least, Vandals allows for Bee's wilful blindness, her preparedness to allow her obsession with Ladner to occlude her view of what is happening to.
The child in their care.
How far might a woman go to accommodate the sins of her husband. Monroe, an inveterate and compulsive presser of Bria Ruses, wrote the story Dimensions seventeen years after learning of Fremlin's abuse, and it addresses exactly this question. Dimensions is Munroe's most harrowing story, inspired by an item Munroe read in the news. It concerns a woman, Dorry, struggling in a relationship with a man, Lloyd, who then does the worst thing imaginable in a fit of rage a
psychotic episode, he murders their three small children. Lloyd is incarcerated, having been deemed criminally insane, and the story opens with a description of Dorry's long journey to visit him in prison. While there were a couple before his heinous crime, Lloyd was paranoid and controlling and had Dorry under his spell. The truth of things between them, the bond, he persuaded her, was not something anybody else could understand, and it was
not anybody else's business. Now, after his murderous spree, Lloyd writes her letters from prison, admitting to his monstrosity but still harboring awful delusions. I can say perfectly, soberly, that I know the worst that I am capable of, and I know that I have done it, he writes. I am judged by the world as a monster, and I have no quarrel with that. But then a paragraph later, am I a monster? The world says so? And if
it is said so, then I agree. But then I say, the world does not have any real meaning for me. In one such letter, which reads at once like a feeble attempt to offer Dory some pitiful semblance of consoling hope, and at the same time a cruelly unconscionable manipulation. He says that he has seen their three children alive and happy in another dimension. They are fine, he writes to their mother, really happy and smart. They don't seem to have any memory of anything bad. He says he wishes
Dory could see what he has seen. After all, she's so much more deserving than he. But if this is impossible, if she can't see her children, obviously she cannot. He hopes that his account of what he has seen will at least make her Quote Heart Lighter Dimensions is an extreme manifestation of the theme explored in vandals of women attaching themselves to men who have an insanity large enough
to contain them. It's partly about the limits of what people can bear to think about, and so it's particularly hard to read after the revelations about Fremlin's abuse of Skinner. Dorry knows that Lloyd, that terrible person that isolated an insane person, as Munroe writes, is out of his mind and still boasting just as he used to. But she wonders what if there was something in what he said quote? And who was to say that The visions of a person who had done such a thing and made such
a journey not mean something. Dorry's life at this point is so desolate and friable. It is like a clod of dry soil that nothing can hold together. She's unreachable to anyone else, including her therapist, missus Sands, who can't even bring herself to say the children's names. All Dory can do, she realizes, is quote remind people of what nobody can stand to be reminded of. Only Lloyd, turns out, can reach her. So she goes to visit him in jail,
thinking what that it might help? Nothing so hopeful, But anyway she goes, and even as she recoils from him, there is something in Lloyd that calls out to her. They've been through something together, something so extreme that no one else can possibly relate. She's bloated with all she knows.
The pool of.
Their shared experience is like gravity. She can't break away. Some reviewers were appalled by Munroe's need to enter this territory to wrestle with this kind of outright evil. She was supposed to be Canadian Chekhovian. She was supposed to keep everything in the same gray Light. She was not supposed to write about a father who murders his own three children, or to describe the scene where Dory comes
home and discovers what Layd has done. You brought it all on yourself, says this monster, as Dorry, crazed with grief, shoves earth into her mouth in a futile attempt to staunch the worst wound imaginable. But when you consider Fremlin and Skinner, and the seemingly inexplicable decisions Monroe made after finding out that her husband had abused her daughter, destroying her emotional and psychological well being, it's hard not to
feel that maybe she did need to go there. She needed to do it, not because she was a Nobel Prize winner, magnificently in control of her craft, and perhaps not even because writing for her was a kind of therapy that helped pacify her troubled conscience. I think she had to do it because there was nothing else she knew to do. Fiction provided her with another dimension, a place to relieve her urge to talk about what was impossible to discuss in a way that anyone else could
be expected to understand. And of course it works like this for readers as well. The endpoint of great fiction is not necessarily wisdom or enlightenment. It's really just another kind of scrabbling around in the dark, scratching here then over there, carving out tunnels, kicking up dust, managing strife. This is not meant to belittle Monroe's achievement. Her writing would not have meant so much to me, nor would she have received so much praise in her lifetime, if
there weren't something very special about it. But I can't straightforwardly say what her stories have given me beyond a lot of deep pleasure, a richer understanding of myself and other people. Motivation and perversities are bafflements, a suspicion of received wisdom, and a feeling for the different ways in which we face up to or hide from reality. All these things are meaningful, of course, but it's harder to
say if they fix any problems. It's also hard to say where the skinner had she read her mother's stories about sex, shame, betrayal, and intergenerational damage. And I have no idea if she has might have found evidence of some deeper understanding and compassion, or just further insult. These are tender bruised matters in the life of a real person, and such speculation feels not only difficult but prurient, as does natural human tendency to wonder about the origins of
the inky swirl around Monroe and her daughters. Where did it begin the author's own childhood. The possibility lurks in her stories, but we will never know. What is clear is that Monroe herself was acutely conscious not only of the limits of fiction its dubious efficacy when it comes to fixing life's problems, but of the added problems the
stories themselves could create. In an epilogue to Lives of Girls and Women, Munro's narrator, a writer like herself, reflects on what it is to lose faith in the fiction she once built up into a richly imagined novel from the quote few poor facts unquote before her, the novel has borrowed from a real family, the sheriffs to whom terrible things have happened in real life. What had happened to them, writes Munroe, isolated them splendidly doomed them to
fiction that's about as efficient and self lacerating. An assessment of what it means to write Munro's kind of fiction as can be imagined. Years after writing a novel, the narrator returns to the town with a greater understanding of her fiction's effect on these real people, still living lives of their own, and therefore not so doomed after all. One of the characters is a photographer who drives around town taking pictures. People are afraid of him because his
pictures make them look dreadful. When they see his car coming, the town's children drop into ditches. It's amusing to think of the residence of Clinton, Ontario responding in like fashion whenever they saw Monroe drive into town. After asking about the fates of the real people on whom she based her fiction, Munroe's narrator registers that quote, such questions persist
in spite of novels. It's a shock when you have dealt so cunningly powerfully with reality to come back and find it still there, Monroe writes, Reality is still there even if you're Alice Munroe. That, I imagine is what Skinner wants the world to understand. It's still there after you've invented the fiction, if you're a writer, and it's still there after you've put the book down. If you're
a reader, your aging parents are still there. Your partner is still in bed beside you, and your children too, if you have them, are not only still there but still subject to your influence, whether you were there when they needed you or not.
That was Sebastian's me reading his piece Into the Dark, The Legacy of Alice Munroe. For more of Australia's best one form writing, visit Themonthly dot Com dot Au. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.